


Good Intentions

by mythpoetry



Category: Burn Notice
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 01:52:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3551639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythpoetry/pseuds/mythpoetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It had all gone bad so quickly.</p>
<p>Michael ran, his blood like battery acid in his veins. He had to get to the car, had to get out of here, had to make sure there was no way the cops could trace the bridge back to him-</p>
<p>Oh. Gilroy looked kind of...<em>dying.</em>"</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In which Mason Gilroy lives, and the resulting fallout colors Michael and Fiona's lives in various shades of gunmetal, blood, and Armani black. Canon compliant up until s03e15.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Intentions

It had all gone bad so quickly.

Michael ran, his blood like battery acid in his veins. He had to get to the car, had to get out of here, had to make sure there was no way the cops could trace the bridge back to him. Or at the very least, that they couldn't catch him. There was no anonymity to protect him anymore. And he looked like crap in orange.

There it was, the stupid armored car that Gilroy had spent a fortune on. Well, Michael was grateful for that now. "Gilroy, we have to leave now." He yanked the door open and-

Oh. Gilroy looked kind of... _dying._

"They say if you live long enough you'll see everything," he said, his mouth bloody. Even with his features twisted in pain his expressions were dignified, somehow, almost elegant. Michael was a little impressed. Then Gilroy spat blood and adrenaline seized him. "What happened?" he demanded. They were already supposed to be leaving the scene. Everything was _wrong _.__

"Paid me ten million dollars. Turns out his plan was to shoot me, come after you."

"Who is he?"

"His name is Simon. Apparently I'm not his only friend in Miami." Something beeped and Gilroy looked, inexplicably, offended. "Sorry. Did I mention that I'm attached to an explosive device?"

Michael looked down and saw the source of the noise; wires curved snakelike around Gilroy's stomach. It looked complicated and deadly. He opened his mouth to say something-what, he never knew- but Gilroy gripped Michael's arm and his brain shut down. Gilroy held him with a strange kind of sincerity, something that had been missing in their previous encounters. It was uncontrolled. Desperate. It was _desperate _. The chain around Gilroy's hands clinked as he tightened his hold. The wiring attached around his abdomen didn't look especially complex, but there was so little time...__

"Perhaps you'd better run along," Gilroy said, his refined voice thick with his own blood. Colored with an emotion Michael couldn't name. Something full of depth, something with teeth and tears. Seconds passed. It felt like eternity. 

The smear of blood on Gilroy's mouth was so _red_. He was almost smiling.

"Goddammit," Michael said, and went to work. 

***

"He's out, Sam," Michael said into his cheap little phone, and for the life of him Gilroy almost snapped _I most certainly am not _before realizing he was probably discussing their former mutual employer. Simon. The man who'd shot him.__

_The man I will make a suit out of _, Gilroy thought darkly.__

The haze of pain was nearly unbearable. He needed a martini. Or eleven. 

Michael had stopped yammering into his phone at some point and was now staring down at Gilroy with an indecipherable expression. He didn't like it. "How's your stomach?" Michael asked. 

"Excruciating," Gilroy said. "I'll be dead within the hour."

Michael knelt next to him in the grass. The air was humid and stank of gasoline. The armored car blazed on, and Gilroy felt annoyed that he'd spent so much money on her only to have her end up like this. Life could be so unfair. "Tell me more about Simon," Michael said briskly. 

"Ah," Gilroy said. "Down to brass tacks then. Haven't you any sympathy for the wounded?"

"You did this to yourself," Michael muttered. "You got yourself into this."

"So did you. Why are you helping me?"

"Because it's the right thing to do," Michael said, which was a complete lie. Michael Westen didn't care about the right thing, and even if he had, saving a murderer probably ranked somewhere between burning orphanages and throwing a sack of kittens into the ocean in terms of being "the right thing to do".

"Of course," Gilroy said, "the _right _thing." Crabgrass prodded his back. Everything hurt. He was going to die in godforsaken _Florida, _of all places, in a bloody swamp with fetid black mud soaking into the back of his Armani suit. His mind felt thick with fog; darkness tugged at the corners of his eyes and he knew he didn't have long. Michael must have seen it, too, because something in his face changed. "Well, I regret to inform you that in doing the right thing, you have cost yourself precious getaway time for absolutely nothing. This is a gut wound, Michael. You're a resourceful boy but there's no getting around this with duct tape or-or _yogurt_. You might as well just leave me."____

"Do you ever shut up," Michael said, probing around Gilroy's stomach with his fingers. He was careful to avoid the gunshot wound itself but, still. It hurt. 

"If you wanted to get your hands on me all you had to do was say so, Michael," Gilroy said.

"Shut. Up." Michael wrapped his fingers around Gilroy's suit jacket. "Help me get this off. I need to assess the wound site." 

The thought of moving wasn't pleasant. "Usually a gentleman would buy me dinner first," Gilroy gasped. "But these are degenerate times." He slowly shrugged himself out of his jacket and then curled his shaking fingers around the buttons of his shirt. Michael caught his hand gently. 

"We can just pull the shirt up," he said, and did just that, exposing a long slice of Gilroy's stomach, most of it smeared redly. His gunshot wound was a dark pucker of blood. Michael tore off a strip of his own shirt, balled it up, and pressed it firmly into his injury. Gilroy hissed. "I need you to hold this down at the same rate of pressure. Mostly it seems like the bleeding itself has stopped. That's a good sign." He patted Gilroy's right leg. "Bring up your knees, yeah-like that." 

"I had no idea you were such a field medic," Gilroy said. Michael stood up.

"We can't stay here much longer. I'm going to call Sam back, see where he is." He smiled down at Gilroy. "Don't go anywhere."

"Wouldn't dream of it," he muttered.

***

"You _what?! _"__

"Sam," Michael started, "listen. He could be useful for a lot of intelligence-"

"Mikey, I don't care if he has who really killed JFK tattooed under his tongue, that guy is the _devil _-"__

"If he knows more about Simon, maybe we could get more of an angle on finding him, _catching _him-"__

"If? _If _he knows more? Mike, that makes me think that you already _asked _him, and he knew very little, so why take the chance that-"____

"Sam!" Michael said. He pinched his forehead and wondered if it was possible to self-induce an aneurysm. "I'm keeping him alive, alright? For now. I'm not arguing about this. Where are you?"

Sam sighed, more heavily than was strictly necessary. "I'm almost there. The airport was a nightmare." Michael could hear an endless parade of sirens in the background. That wasn't a good sign. "It's gonna have to be a slow roll situation, brother. This place is crawling with cops. We can't afford to lose any more time. Can you get your murderer moving?" 

"Yes," Michael gritted out. This was turning out to be a very, very long day. He hung up abruptly, then walked back over to where Gilroy was still lying down, hopefully not bleeding out.

He was being a trooper about the bullet in him, Michael had to give him credit for that. He wasn't whining too much, and was attempting to keep his poker face, which Michael thought said good things about his survival. 

On the other hand, the fact that in the few minutes Michael had been gone Gilroy had become three shades lighter said... _not _good things about his survival.__

"I fear your medical genius didn't quite do the trick, Michael," Gilroy said. Even his lips were almost white. This was bad.

"Sam's going to be here soon, I promise," Michael said. "Just-just hang on until then, alright? Then-"

"Then, what? Then this _Sam _is going to have some magic wand to wave and make me fit for the ball again? I'm dead, Michael. We should really stop dragging this out-"__

Michael wrapped his hands around Gilroy's shoulders and shook him, not gently, not quite as hard as he wanted to because, well. Bullet wound. "You're dead when _I say you're dead, _do you understand me? I'm not done with you yet. So you're going to stay alive until I get what I need from you, and then your survival is up to you. Do you understand?"__

It was as if they were both suspended in time, Michael with his hands curved around the ball of Gilroy's shoulders, Gilroy with a wet smear of red across his mouth, his too pale skin, his eye contact mocking and burningly sincere, all at once. Nothing moved or made noise or breathed. Then-

"Perfectly," Gilroy whispered. He wiped blood from his mouth. "I should have killed you when I had the chance."

Michael straightened. He didn't feel guilty, not about this. He wasn't the one who had twisted his arm to work with someone like Simon. "You got shot because you got into bed with bad people, Gilroy."

"I got shot," Gilroy said, "because I got _sucked _into the black hole that is Michael Westen." He rubbed his bloodied hand on his shirt with a disgusted look. "I was warned away from you, you know. At the time I thought perhaps it was because you still had a bit of misguided decency in you, a sort of parasitic holdover from your days as a boy scout." He tried to sit up, slowly, and Michael fought the urge to help him. "But now I think that wasn't entirely the reason. You are quite frightening when you want to be, Mr. Westen." Gilroy gave a small smile. "It's very... _interesting."___

"Sam will be here any minute," Michael said. 

***

Climbing into a hideous car while trying not to scream in pain probably ranked among Gilroy's worst memories. Top ten, certainly.

_Sam _turned out to be an aging, obviously ex-military man with a bad tan and a ridiculous chin. He didn't look particularly pleased to see Gilroy. At least the feeling was mutual.__

"Mike, you sure about this?" Sam asked Michael. "I mean-"

"I'm sure, Sam," Michael said. 

"Fine but when he tries to suck your blood, don't come crying to me."

"The only blood I'm sucking on is my own," Gilroy mumbled. Michael turned around from the front seat to stare incredulously at him. "I've been shot. I'm not at my best," Gilroy said weakly. 

"You do seem a lot more grumpy," Michael agreed. "I need you to pull your knees towards and above you, like you did before." Why was he smiling? Stupid hair. Stupid white teeth.

"I will kill you," Gilroy mouthed into the seat, knees bent awkwardly. In that moment, he truly wished he had. When people ended up disappointing him, he ended up... _ending _them. Why had he allowed Michael to be the exception? Obviously that had been a mistake. A bullet sat in his gut like a dark pearl and he was in a car that smelled of beer and vinyl. The situation defined low point.__

"What happened to the playful flirtation, Gilroy? That's the second time you've threatened to kill me in the last ten minutes. It's almost like we're not friends anymore." 

"Getting shot _does _put me out of sorts."__

"Yeah," Michael said, "I admit, I think I preferred the hot tub."

The car seemed to sway. "Mike, uh, you wanna tell me what actually went on between you and this guy?"

"Oh, you know. The usual."

Michael couldn't be who he said he'd been. Gilroy knew that now, knew it for sure. A man who razed villages and burned busloads of people would never have gone through so much trouble to save someone else, especially at the expense of himself. God knew Gilroy wouldn't have. 

"Gilroy?"

Which meant that Michael had been lying all along. It explained his hesitation, his constant questioning, his reluctance to actually _hurt _other people. Gilroy's expression darkened. It may also have explained Claude's failure, which meant that Gilroy had permanently extended the thief's injuries because Michael sabotaged him. But what was the point?__

"Hey, Gilroy?"

Was he trying to prevent Simon's escape? Well, it was a bit too late for that, wasn't it? Gilroy groaned and tried to think through the dark spots stinging in his head. He was going to ask Michael about this, make no mistake. There had better be satisfactory answers available. As soon as the pain stopped. 

"Gilroy, please go back to making passes at me that are about as subtle as a brick. If you die right now, you won't get to see how uncomfortable I am."

"Mike. I don't think he's going to make it."

"Just drive, Sam."

"Mike-"

"Just drive!"

What had Michael just said? Gilroy couldn't remember. Everything was hazy, like the air was full of gasoline fumes. His suit was a mess. He couldn't stop thinking about the blood he'd wiped on it. Blood was impossible to scrub away. It stained forever. 

"Hey. Hey!" Something hit his face, suddenly, and the world seemed slightly more precise. Michael was looking at him. "Stay with me," he said, then turned his head. "Sam, do you think you can drive us back towards the airport?"

"Uh, yeah, I can, but why would we wanna do that?"

"I have an idea."

The car lurched. "I hate it when you say that, brother. Something loud and painful always follows." Tires squealed. "You know I think you're going through way too much trouble for some sociopath?"

"Yeah, I know, Sam."

The apparent u-turn that Sam had just made was bad for Gilroy's stomach. What was worse was the vague glimmer of hope that was starting to grow in him like a weed. He didn't want to begin to believe he could possibly survive this, only to face that dark tunnel alone. It...frightened him.

"If you can last another ten minutes," Michael said, "I can save your life."

Gilroy sat back in darkness and tried not to have faith.


End file.
